Abstract

The article takes Helmuth Plessner’s Political Anthropology from 1931 as a postfoundationalist theory of society avant la lettre - which is very similar to the later works of Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau, and Chantal Mouffe. Or, the article takes Plessner’s essay as an ‘ontology’ of the Political. After introducing remarks on the historical debates, in which Plessner aimed to intervene, his theory of the Political is reconstructed, within the three categories of ‘unfathomability’, of the constitutive outside, and of the vulnerability of the human body. In a third and last step, Plessner’s most central and most problematic category for the Political - the ‘popular existence’ - is discussed: The ‘people’ is made visible as being a key notion of postfoundational theories of modern democracy, for it is - beneath the ‘Individual’ - one of the imaginary foundations, one of the foundational outsides of a democratically instituted collective.